It’s been 30 years since a gifted young theater director named Wendy Knox decided to hang out her shingle in the Twin Cities and start a little theater company called Frank Theatre. Such ventures usually have an arc of about eight years until the energy, donors and volunteer base peter out. What’s been Knox’s secret of sustainability? Well, mostly being such a creative theater artist that everyone wants to work with her and see what she has to say.

When Knox decided to re-stage one of Frank’s most acclaimed productions, Marc Blitzstein’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” the fact that the 2003 Frank version was such a sensation surely made it even more attractive to prospective actors. For example, this paper’s Dominic Papatola named it the best show of the year.

Whereas the 2003 production took place in the Sears building that now houses Minneapolis’ Midtown Global Market, this one’s in a little black box theater in an industrial section of St. Paul (Gremlin Theatre). While that might subtract from the novelty of the earlier version, it still has the same energy and tone of fist-waving agitprop. Feeling at once like a cautionary cartoon and a sad slice of life, “The Cradle Will Rock” is very 1937 and, if you squint a bit, very 2019.

First, about 1937: As the U.S. tried to climb out of the depths of the Depression, a number of government jobs programs were started and one was the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project. A playwright/composer named Marc Blitzstein was inspired by the satirical style of German theater artist Bertolt Brecht when he wrote “The Cradle Will Rock,” and the Federal Theatre Project was set to produce it.

But Congress was starting to get nervous about common folk complaining about the corrupting influence of the rich and powerful – the central theme of the musical – so funding was curtailed and the kibosh seemingly put on it until director Orson Welles and the locked-out cast rented out another theater and performed it anyway.

That kind of “You can’t shut us up” attitude permeates Frank’s production, which places naturalistic off-the-street characters alongside over-the-top authority figures to tell a set of tales of how the average citizens of a place called Steeltown are betrayed by the institutions they trust, be they pastors, newspaper editors, doctors, college presidents or even artists. Pulling the strings is the money-clip-wielding Mr. Mister, played with the tone of a cigar-chomping mobster by J.C. Cutler.

While there’s much of the comic in “The Cradle Will Rock,” it is at root a sad tale that bears discomfiting prescience to life in modern America. Blitzstein’s central tenet is that everything’s for sale, and the implication is that capitalism is not a system with your best interests at heart. We witness as rich brats get their futures acquired for them, a minister (the powerfully voiced JoeNathan Thomas) transforms from dove to hawk at the behest of Mrs. Mister, and professors with leftist tendencies are discharged.

This could all be intensely depressing if the Brecht-esque staging style didn’t serve so much vigor with its vinegar. Each of the 17 cast members seizes upon their characters with an admirable balance of believability and silliness, tackling Blitzstein’s complex and unpredictable brand of show tuneage with aplomb. While there aren’t any melodies likely to stick in your head, many an image could.

All that energy helps make Frank’s show more enjoyable than it perhaps has a right to be. Its call for strikes as the only antidote to moneyed power surely landed on welcoming ears in 1937, but it’s understandable if those attending this production are fatigued and discouraged. While unionization is the suggested remedy here, it’s easy to sigh and say that ship has sailed. But extend the argument to any form of collective action of the oppressed against the powerful and it could stir the rebel within you.

Frank Theatre’s “The Cradle Will Rock”

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; through April 7

Where: Gremlin Theatre, 550 Vandalia St., St. Paul

Tickets: $30-$25, available at franktheatre.org or 800-838-3006

Capsule: Some creatively presented agitprop that could gauge your willingness to act.

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